(07-12-2017 12:22 PM)KCat Wrote: Universities are at a cross roads... They need to get back to preparing students for a career and drop the social engineering...
Days of record enrollment may be coming to an end.......

*A new Pew Research Center survey found 58 percent of right-leaning Americans think colleges and universities are harming the country—up 13 percent from last year.

So are you among those who think universities should stop teaching things like History or Philosophy or Astronomy? Just become purely utilitarian trade schools turning out trained, but not educated, worker bees for corporate America? The job of a research university is to educate students and create new knowledge. And while that doesn't need to be incompatible with some form of training, that shouldn't negate the primary mission. If somebody is uncomfortable with that mission then send your kids to a community college or trade school like DeVry.

(07-12-2017 12:11 PM)TubaCat Wrote: UC is the 22nd best school in Ohio?? Xavier is 13th!? GTFOH. This is the most absurd list of schools I've ever seen.

How about we factor in the Yelp rating of the closest Burger King? Or how easy it is to score some cocaine on Thursday? It would be just as helpful as this toilet paper.

Should we be surprised that our friends at the Enquirer would grab this story off the wire and run with it? Most people who are knowledgeable about higher education in Ohio would find these rankings laughable.

To my point, only one university partnered up with OSU last spring for a well publicized advocacy event at the Statehouse in Columbus. Hint: it wasn't Shawnee State.

(07-12-2017 12:11 PM)TubaCat Wrote: UC is the 22nd best school in Ohio?? Xavier is 13th!? GTFOH. This is the most absurd list of schools I've ever seen.

How about we factor in the Yelp rating of the closest Burger King? Or how easy it is to score some cocaine on Thursday? It would be just as helpful as this toilet paper.

Should we be surprised that our friends at the Enquirer would grab this story off the wire and run with it? Most people who are knowledgeable about higher education in Ohio would find these rankings laughable.

To my point, only one university partnered up with OSU last spring for a well publicized advocacy event at the Statehouse in Columbus. Hint: it wasn't Shawnee State.

(07-12-2017 12:22 PM)KCat Wrote: Universities are at a cross roads... They need to get back to preparing students for a career and drop the social engineering...
Days of record enrollment may be coming to an end.......

*A new Pew Research Center survey found 58 percent of right-leaning Americans think colleges and universities are harming the country—up 13 percent from last year.

So are you among those who think universities should stop teaching things like History or Philosophy or Astronomy? Just become purely utilitarian trade schools turning out trained, but not educated, worker bees for corporate America? The job of a research university is to educate students and create new knowledge. And while that doesn't need to be incompatible with some form of training, that shouldn't negate the primary mission. If somebody is uncomfortable with that mission then send your kids to a community college or trade school like DeVry.

Getting an education that leads to an occupation and getting exposed to history, etc. are not mutually exclusive. My BBA was in Accounting but about 50% of my course load could be described as "liberal arts". Those courses included multiple English courses, Physics, Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Modern European History, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Calculus, Boolean Geometry, Economics.

Getting a foo foo degree allows too many to run up costs of hundreds of thousands and be qualified to ask "You want to super size that?"

How do they rank the schools? The six metrics shown seemingly don't matter at all.
They show UC with better SAT/ACT scores than Xavier, better starting salary, half the cost of attendance, but somehow X is 9 schools better than UC in Ohio. Lol.

I can't believe people get paid to make these lists...I want in on that action.

(07-12-2017 12:22 PM)KCat Wrote: Universities are at a cross roads... They need to get back to preparing students for a career and drop the social engineering...
Days of record enrollment may be coming to an end.......

*A new Pew Research Center survey found 58 percent of right-leaning Americans think colleges and universities are harming the country—up 13 percent from last year.

So are you among those who think universities should stop teaching things like History or Philosophy or Astronomy? Just become purely utilitarian trade schools turning out trained, but not educated, worker bees for corporate America? The job of a research university is to educate students and create new knowledge. And while that doesn't need to be incompatible with some form of training, that shouldn't negate the primary mission. If somebody is uncomfortable with that mission then send your kids to a community college or trade school like DeVry.

Getting an education that leads to an occupation and getting exposed to history, etc. are not mutually exclusive. My BBA was in Accounting but about 50% of my course load could be described as "liberal arts". Those courses included multiple English courses, Physics, Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Modern European History, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Calculus, Boolean Geometry, Economics.

Getting a foo foo degree allows too many to run up costs of hundreds of thousands and be qualified to ask "You want to super size that?"

It depends on the school that foo-foo degree comes from. There is no such thing as a business major at the most elite schools in the country like Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Yale. Elite employers like Wall Street, blue chip consulting firms and Silicon Valley VC firms, don't recruit anyone from schools like UC, but they hire hundreds of History and Philosophy majors from places like Princeton and Chicago every year.

Even at top public flagships, there are plenty of recruiters and job opportunities for liberal arts majors. I'd have no problem with a kid majoring in History at a top 25 public university. The further down the food chain from there, I would tend to agree with you that immediate job opportunities out of college might narrow, but I still don't think it consigns one to working in fast food.

(07-12-2017 02:52 PM)DownOnRohs Wrote: How do they rank the schools? The six metrics shown seemingly don't matter at all.
They show UC with better SAT/ACT scores than Xavier, better starting salary, half the cost of attendance, but somehow X is 9 schools better than UC in Ohio. Lol.

I can't believe people get paid to make these lists...I want in on that action.

Yea...their methodology seems very sketchy. UC costs less, has better students and its students make more out of school than Xavier students... who cares the percentage who get grants if the grants are just used to get it closer to UC's costs?

(07-12-2017 02:52 PM)DownOnRohs Wrote: How do they rank the schools? The six metrics shown seemingly don't matter at all.
They show UC with better SAT/ACT scores than Xavier, better starting salary, half the cost of attendance, but somehow X is 9 schools better than UC in Ohio. Lol.

I can't believe people get paid to make these lists...I want in on that action.

Yea...their methodology seems very sketchy. UC costs less, has better students and its students make more out of school than Xavier students... who cares the percentage who get grants if the grants are just used to get it closer to UC's costs?

Many rankings use 4-year graduation rate as a metric, which immediately discounts the education value at schools with extended curriculum...such as the one that about half of our students are a part of (w/ Engineering, DAAP, Nursing, and Business). That drastically skews towards liberal arts schools who, by and large, do not offer extended programs.